Senior Production
Post XIII
As you could probably tell from the title, this is a post mortem of my project this semester. A lot has happened in the past few weeks and I’d like to spend a little bit of time to talk about my reflection on that time.
This semester, my team and I decided to create a game we call The Last Light. Being a narrative driven survival-horror game, we knew going in that it would not only be difficult to pull off, but it would also likely be large in scope. This doesn’t even take into account things like my experience in Unreal Engine 4 (I started with no experience whatsoever), or even the likely hood of our kind of game making it through to next semester (historically, narrative games and horror related games don’t do so well, we were both). The deck was stacked pretty high against us. But this didn’t stop us. We put our hearts into the game and the result, I think, is pretty good. The process, however, wasn’t without its problems.
So the biggest problem for me at least was not knowing the engine. This meant that I had to spend a considerable amount of time learning and getting comfortable with it. That ended up being a month due to how my work schedule panned out. I probably could have done it in a week if I was able to actually work on the project like a full time job. It felt like a very long month in my eyes and my work felt very difficult because I knew nothing. Luckily, everything eventually clicked and I was able to do work an order of magnitude faster; but for a few weeks, I was definitely concerned about my choice to do this.
The other problem for me was the genre of our game. I’m fine with narrative based games and survival games, but horror really isn’t my strong suite. I don’t really like to play horror games and I certainly don’t like to be scared. This initially seemed problematic for me, but I realized as I continued to work on the game that it wasn’t a problem at all. My work focused on systems, tools and a little bit of gameplay and I almost never dealt with anything scary. On top of that, it turns out that like a lot of things, you get de-sensitized to it after a while. My group all had this problem with the project. After a little bit, we were no longer able to tell if things were actually scary or if they just seemed cheap and bad. We relied heavily on feedback from people outside the group on whether or not it worked because we had no real way to gauge it.
As for the team, I think we worked pretty well together. There wasn’t any personality clashing and everyone was reliable. The work got done and with a good level of quality from everyone. Going in, I was definitely afraid of ending up with team mates like the ones I had previously in production 2 (lets just say, it was bad). I am very happy with each and every member on my team and It was a pleasure to work with them this semester.
But what does this mean for the future? Well, seeing as our game made it into next semester (apparently we are the second horror game to ever make it at Champlain), we have a lot of work to do. This means that our team will soon be expanding, potentially 2-3x larger than it currently is. Our goals for next semester are just as ambitious as they were this semester, but somehow I think we’ll be able to pull it off again.